The invention relates to an air freight container and/or an air freight pallet with a planar bottom wall and/or side wall and at least two guide devices arranged on the bottom wall and/or side wall.
Air freight containers are known from the prior art in various embodiments and are used in general to transport large quantities of mail items, luggage, freight, parcels, or other transportable goods as items to be transported bundled together in large units in aircraft. In the specialist terminology, air freight containers are referred to as unit load devices or ULDs for short and are embodied on the one hand as pallets or on the other hand as containers. A ULD container is generally formed as a closed container made of sheet aluminium with a profile frame, or a as a combination of aluminium frame with plastic walls. The items to be transported or cargo can be loaded and unloaded into/from the ULD container through a closable opening. In the case of a ULD pallet, a base wall is usually formed from a panel made of sheet aluminium with a substructure of profiles, wherein eyelets for fastening freight nets in order to secure the items to be transported arrangeable on the bottom wall are arranged at the edges of the bottom wall. Since a large number of individual items are transported as units bundled in a ULD container and/or on a ULD pallet, fewer individual mail items on the whole have to be handled during the loading and unloading of the aircraft, thus saving ground staff, time, and money.
On account of the generally very strict safety requirements in the field of air travel, ULD containers and ULD pallets, also referred to hereinafter as air freight containers or air freight pallets, or as containers or pallets for short, must be certified for an aircraft type. Specific container and pallet types have thus been developed which differ from one another in terms of their dimensions, the volume transportable in the container or on the pallet, and the aircraft type for which the container or the pallet is certified. Modifications to existing certified container or pallet types are very complex, since a new, very costly and time-consuming certification process has to be carried out for almost any modification. Depending on the particular transport volume and transport weight, it is therefore also not possible to use just any, specifically adapted and/or constructed air freight containers or air freight pallets. This, however, means that in practice it is not uncommon for air freight containers or air freight pallets that are only partly loaded to be transported by aircraft. Since the cost for shipping the items to be transported is calculated not only by weight, but also by transported volume, which is measured by the volume of the air freight container or the air freight pallet and not by the volume of the actual items to be transported, such a drawback is doubly annoying.
A further problem of air freight containers that are only partly filled or air freight pallets that are only partly loaded is that, with the existing possibilities, the items transported in the air freight container or on the air freight pallet cannot be particularly effectively secured against damage caused by slipping or falling during the flight. There are also certain items which can be stacked vertically only to a limited extent or which must be separated imperatively from other items during transport. False bottoms installed fixedly in air freight containers or space dividers installed fixedly on the air freight pallets, however, do no constitute an effective solution to this problem, since the false bottoms or the space dividers make it impossible to transport large-volume goods.